Montreal Mural Festival

This larger than life costume fantasy caught my eye at the Montreal Mural Festival* when we visited June 2019. We had ventured to Montreal and Mont Tremblant, a ski resort, on an East Coast trip that included a pit stop to New York and New Jersey to see friends and family and do some sightseeing. 

When we stopped by, Miss Van, the mural artist, from Barcelona, was painting Guererras (warrior women) on site. Her towering godlike women seemed to peer down at us from their gargantuan height. One sat and the other knelt at the height of this two story building. I came to realize what made this particular mural pop out. It was a full unapologetic display of female pleasure painted at a heroic scale. The women wore lavish costumes in casual states of undress. If they were warriors, their laguorous stance contradicted the label. They held their ornamental staffs with griffin heads and root like tails in loose grips. Meanwhile, the diagonal lines of their staffs criss crossed and pointed to their suggestive poses beneath their waistlines. 

Just Scandalous!

Each warrior wears a mammal-bird familiar atop her impressive mane. One wears her hair in a loose Bavarian braid that wraps around her face like a chin strap. The other’s hair is loose around the face tethered to her neck by her hair-tasseled necklace. Their faces are like pale Venetian masks with punctuated features. They keep watch through large heavy lidded eyes beneath arched brows that end in small features: a tiny bisected nose and bright bee stung lips.

The overall effect of these women’s coiff and bird hats remind me of Marie Antoinette’s famous pouf hairstyle of the Rococo era. As the last hold out of royal pomp and privilege, Marie Antoinette‘s extreme Rococo style shows the excesses of an era: tall anti-gravity hair requiring servants and artistry to maintain. But this queen also had a yearning for dressing down. Her infamous dressed down portrait in white dress, robe de gaulle, set off another fashion frenzy. In Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun‘s 1783 portrait, Marie Antoinette en chemise, she wears her hair loose in simple white cotton dress holding a rose. It was like wearing underwear as outerwear. After public protests, the artist replaced this portrait with the more acceptable Marie Antoinette With a Rose, (same pose, same rose)!

Similarly, these noble warriors advertise dressing down in style. Their plunging V neck onesies with a lavish cover up are reminiscent of a kimono except lined with mini fur pelts. In contrast, the desolate landscape behind them seems to point to an impending dark winter. Forms of bloating bird mammals immobilized by their blob-like forms warn of the potential pitfalls of excess. They cry from their mounds of fleshy fur either in protest or hunger. Their forms are echoed in the barren if not soft background hills with ocean, sea, or snow in the beyond—it’s hard to tell.

Beyond this desolate landscape dominated by guerreras: a larger cityscape of everyday women and a girl glance a their warning. Realities momentarily collide as each passerby catches a glimpse of this fantastic reality.

*The Montreal Mural Festival, is an 11-day festival that celebrates murals as a democratizing international art form.

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